Tag Archives: engagement

If you’d like to assess your personal engagement level, or see how your organization or client organization compares to others, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance (EEA) offers several no-cost benchmark tools.

Accessible through their website, the EEA provides three free and confidential tools to help individuals and organizations benchmark various aspects of engagement. There are currently three different ways in which you can benchmark engagement levels:

Gauge your company’s or client’s general level of engagement – how it compares in terms of the same criteria used to create the Engaged Company Stock Index

Benchmark your company’s or client’s engagement practices – how they compare with best practices and other survey respondents in terms of employee, customer, distributor, and vendor engagement practices

Our previous post identified the role that trust plays in an organization’s success, and referenced it as “the soft concept producing results that are hard to beat.”

While trust may seem too soft a concept to produce a competitive edge, the facts indicate otherwise.

In fact, a high level of trust is essential to creating an agile, highly competitive organization and here are four reasons why.

1.)No Trust — No SpeedIn a world where new challenges arise very quickly, it is the failure to act, failure to improve, and failure to innovate that poses the biggest risk to a company — not the risk of making a mistake. However, to an individual in a low-trust environment, by far the biggest risk is making a mistake. For these individuals, trying something new is much riskier than doing what’s been always been done. Innovation or even simple improvement is not going to happen. The whole organization slows down.

Covey, in The Speed of Trust, puts it this way: “When trust is low … it places a hidden ‘tax’ on every communication, every interaction, every strategy, every decision.” People don’t fully hear what their leaders are saying, because they factor in guesses about the leader’s intentions. They wonder how transparent their leader is being. Employees don’t buy-in to decisions that they don’t trust.

Aron Ain, author of WorkInspired, How to Build an Organization Where Everyone Loves to Work, and CEO of Kronos (a leading global provider of workforce management cloud solutions), points out that lack of trust places “a huge overhead burden on a relationship.” He insists that when you employ someone, you should go ahead and trust them! Will you get burned on occasion when trusting people?

“Absolutely!” Ain says, “But almost always my trust in team members has proven well-founded. And the benefits are numerous.”

By building a culture where employees know they are trusted and where they trust their managers and teammates, Kronos has created an organization where it is safe for people to be creative and to aim for the best possible outcomes, continuously getting better and better.

2.) No Trust — No “Exposing Reality” Exposing reality means trying very hard to look at things the way they really are, rather than the way we wish they were. As Ain points out, “the faster you see things as they really are, the faster you can get to work on improving them.”

But in a low-trust environment, people are especially motivated to gloss over uncomfortable truths and to declare victory and move on rather than checking to see if they did or didn’t get the results they expected. Trust enables us to admit what we don’t know, recognize and recover quickly from mistakes, and to put uncomfortable information, questions, and contrary opinions out in the open, where the team can work through them with honesty and passion to arrive together at the best strategies and decisions.

3.) No Trust — Poor ResultsIn a low-trust environment, employees hold back information or ideas that seem risky to share, so leaders make decisions based on incomplete information and without knowing all the potential consequences. And when employees believe their managers are making decisions without all the relevant input and information, they often question or even slow-walk the decisions.

Covey cites polls showing that only 45% of employees have trust and confidence in senior management. Lencioni, in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, places lack of trust at the foundation of his pyramid of dysfunctions culminating in poor results. Without trust among a team, people keep their cards close to their chests. They are afraid to admit the limits of what they know, afraid to admit any vulnerabilities. Because they don’t trust one another, they fear conflict and withhold uncomfortable information and dissenting views. Without complete information, these teams make poor decisions, and the decisions they do make are poorly executed because they do not arrive at a shared commitment to the decision unless they have aired and resolved dissenting views. Thus, a lack of trust leads to both flawed strategies and poor execution.

4,) Trust Inspires and Engages Covey observes that “trust is one of the most powerful forms of motivation and inspiration. People want to be trusted. They respond to trust. They thrive on trust.”

This is exactly what Ain sees happening at Kronos. “Because we place so much faith in employees,” he explains in WorkInspired, “they return the favor, placing a remarkable degree of trust in us. Their trust in turn leads to far better performance — more innovation, quicker recovery from mistakes, more energy and enthusiasm at work.”

The next step, of course, is identifying the best way to build a “culture of trust,” which will be the subject of our next post.

You might call it a “secret weapon” but, to be honest, it is the exact opposite. Because unlike a weapon, it is constructive rather than destructive; the only harm it could do a competitor is to leave them behind.

And it is anything but secret!

Trust — the soft concept producing hard to beat results

In his recent book, WorkInspired, How to Build an Organization Where Everyone Loves to Work, Aron Ain openly shares the pivotal role it has played in Kronos’s amazing growth story.

This “secret weapon” is trust — the soft concept producing results that are hard to beat.

The role that trust plays in an organization’s success has been written about before by keen observers of human and organizational dynamics.

Patrick Lencioni in The Five Disfunctions of a Team identifies the lack of trust among a management team as the root cause of most poor performance.

Stephen M. R. Covey in The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything passionately echoes this view, citing research indicating high-trust organizations out-perform their low-trust competitors by 300%, because a lack of trust increases costs while simultaneously reducing an organization’s speed and agility.

What’s different about Ain, CEO of Kronos, a leading global provider of workforce management cloud solutions, is that he can tell us how trust is working in action today and about the tools and methods in place to support the practice and enhance the effectiveness of trust.

At Kronos, everyone is expected to give trust both within and outside their functional areas and to practice behaviors that earn the trust of their employees, teammates, and managers. According to Ain, the culture of trust contributes to much more than high engagement and retention, as important as those are, but to amazing business results.

And the results Kronos has achieved are great! Revenue has tripled; Kronos has surpassed 35,000 customers worldwide, innovations are rolling out faster than ever, and employee engagement scores are through the roof. Kronos once again occupies the #1 spot in the Boston Globe’s Top Places to Work list in Massachusetts. It received an award from Fortune Magazine for Best Workplace for Millennials – 2018. It is on both Glassdoor’s and Fortune Magazine’s lists of top 100 places to work and has received numerous other awards for workplace engagement.

Based on a recent newsletter by our associate Sheila Julien, our next post will share four specific reasons why “trust” works and why it is essential to creating an agile, highly competitive organization.

A young, seemingly fast-rising junior executive had been working at a large bank for just over six years. When he was asked about his job and how he felt about it he said, “The job’s OK.”

His lack of enthusiasm was evident, and when pressed to say more he added, “Well, I’m not really learning much anymore.”

When asked if he was fully-engaged he said probably not but went on to say that he still did a great job. “I still give 100% and consider myself to be a great employee,” he said. Then, after a short pause, he added,” But I don’t give them 110%… and there’s a big difference between 100% and 110% — at least for me.”

When asked if he was out looking for a new position he responded, “No…, but I’m listening.”

When asked whether he told his boss about how he was feeling he said, “Yeah, but….”

How many people in how many places feel like he does? He is bright, educated, skilled, well-liked, and might be an ideal candidate for a senior leadership position…if he stays.

But is he being made to feel like an important part of the team? Does anyone realize that he could be giving more? Is he being engaged in an intentional or formalized fashion?

Among the many documented advantages of an engaged worker are loyalty and the discretionary effort that they put forth; going the extra mile; the above-and-beyond attitude… giving 110%! How many innovative ideas might that extra 10% yield? How much more productivity? What impact might it have on customers or coworkers?

The Real Cost of Disengagement

And if he doesn’t stay, the simple replacement costs are not the real issue. He is a potential super-star! He is a known-entity… trustworthy, dependable, low-risk. What are the real (or hidden!) costs associated with disengagement; the costs of not getting 110%… the costs of not only lost workers, but also of lost opportunities?

Enterprise engagement has been a frequently-addressed topic in this blog, and a recent post shared some of our Partners in Improvement group’s thoughts on an important element of an engagement strategy — rewards and recognition.

In that post, several points were made about being careful with the use of extrinsic, or monetary rewards as motivators.

To add some additional perspective, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance shared information from a past New York Times column “The Secret of Effective Motivation,” in which authors Amy Wrzesniewski, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, and Barry Schwartz, Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, suggest that the most effective type of motivation in terms of actual long-term results is action based on an internal motive — that is, “the pleasure derived from the activity and results themselves rather than from an instrumental motive such as the desire for fame or money.”

“Helping people focus on the meaning and impact of their work, rather than on, say, the financial returns it will bring, may be the best way to improve not only the quality of their work but also… their financial success,” the article states.

This viewpoint is well-aligned with our “Engagement Around the Work” approach, which involves specific steps for achieving a
culture of engagement that is linked with team productivity, performance, and job satisfaction.

This approach incorporates a clear objective of engaging people around the one thing they all have in common—and the one thing that can bring about increased profitability and a sustainable competitive edge—the work.

As you may know, in 2015 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued an update to its widely followed 9001 standards.

This update was not, at the time, officially part of the 9001 standards, but it included the addition of new Quality Management Principles outlining, according to an Engagement Strategies Media (ESM) article, the fundamental conditions necessary for an organization to sustain high levels of quality and performance.

The Quality Management Principles are:

Customer focus

Leadership

Engagement of people

Process approach

Improvement

Evidence-based decision-making

Relationship management

As noted in the article, these principles focus on both “process” and “people/engagement.” As the article goes on to suggest, this balanced focus is clearly necessary to achieve and sustain high levels of quality and performance.

The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) will kick-off the creation of the world’s first academic Enterprise Engagement (EE) Innovation Center at Engagement World, May 7-9 in Galveston, the UTMB’s headquarters city.

The Innovation Center is a division of UTMB’s International Center for Enterprise Engagement at TheICEE.org, which was founded last year to manage the first ISO 10018 Quality People Management certification and support the creation of standards in all areas of engagement.

“Our mission is to create a formal academic and business discipline and a vibrant marketplace that provides expertise and solutions to help organizations engage all key audiences, customers, patients, distribution partners, employees, vendors and communities in a more efficient way based on a better return-on-investment,” said Dr. Ron McKinley, the Center’s co-founder and President.

Lee S. Webster, co-founder of ICEE, added, “We have seen what ISO 9001 has done for Quality Management, and we’re confident a systematic approach based on standards can do the same for Quality People Management.”

An earlier post summarized the real costs associated with disengaged workers, which is close to $500 billion per year based on research by glassdoor.com, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance (EEA), and others.

Wow!

Fortunately, there are proactive steps that can be taken to avoid these costs and the collateral damage to team morale and brand that is a regular side-effect.

Based on research and data shared by the EEA and The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the following five steps can drive employee engagement, and reduce the number of disengaged workers and the associated costs:

Enhanced recruiting and on-boarding — The first steps involve the inclusion of the organization’s mission and vision into interviewing conversations, and a more conscious effort to identify and hire people with aligned goals. Adding a mentor program to the on-boarding process helps new hires assimilate
faster so they became more productive in less time as well.
Enabling people to achieve higher levels of productivity and success early-on promotes greater engagement levels, and reduces first-year attrition rates. Early churn tends to demoralize
everyone, so in addition to reducing re-hiring and re-training costs, the costs associated with negativity within the existing workforce are also reduced.

Consistent performance management and communication — People need to have meaning in their work, and understand how their work aligns with organizational objectives. This communication works best when systematized as part of structured, proactive approach to performance management.

Learning and development — A young, fast-rising junior executive had been working at a large bank for just over six years. When he was asked about his job and how he felt about it he said, “The job’s OK.” His lack of enthusiasm was evident, and when pressed to say more he added, “Well, I’m not really learning much anymore.” He went on to confirm that he was not truly engaged, and that he did not make much of an extra or discretionary effort, which engaged workers regularly make. Forward thinking
business leaders understand that the path to sustainable employee engagement is to drive productivity, and to do so through ongoing education and empowerment.

Recognition and rewards — Recognizing and rewarding employees is not a new concept, but if the goal is to engage people rather than simply acknowledge milestones (such as length of service), then the approach must be aligned with what is meaningful to each recipient.

Flexibility and work/life balance — Employer/employee relationships, expectations, and engagement criteria have evolved significantly over the past decade. Data from a PwC survey of 44,000 workers who had become less engaged indicated that “71% said their jobs interfered with their personal lives, and 70% said they wanted to be able to work from home.”
Employees can also become disengaged when they feel their managers only care about the bottom line. More than one-third of U.S. employees (39%) don’t believe their bosses encourage them to take allotted vacation days, and almost half (45%) say their bosses don’t help them disconnect from work
while on vacation, according to a Randstad survey.

Continuing with the theme of why “work matters,” the goal is to implement improvement initiatives in work at all levels every day.

Continuous Improvement in daily work helps organizations make improvement a way of life — a workplace culture rather than just a program or one-time event.

A few additional considerations for achieving this mind-set include:

Clear accountability for each person in each department or group

There must be agreed upon ways to measure performance

There must be consequences (good and bad) to reinforce accountability

Established and understood performance measures and targets

Confirm the purpose of each person’ work and each department’s work. As noted in our previous post, people perform best and maintain higher-levels of engagement when they know that their work matters. It is important that everyone understands the purpose

There must be clear priorities and goals, which creates alignment

People must be trained so that they have the skills to analyze and improve the work; leaders should be involved in these educational programs — in both a participatory and supportive role

Just like Continuous Improvement (CI) has become a standard component of doing business for most organizations, the emerging field of Enterprise Engagement applies a strategic approach to designing and implementing programs that achieve clear, measurable results through people.

When no one could measure the economic benefits of engagement, it was a “nice to have.” But now, as summarized in a recent article published by Engagement Strategies Media, it is quickly becoming an essential means for maintaining a strong competitive position, as market share tends to go to those organizations that are the most productive and that “wow” not only their customers but all of the people involved with their businesses.

Yet most companies lack formalized engagement strategies.

Fortunately the emerging field of Enterprise Engagement has led others to take a more strategic approach, such as Engagement Around the Work. Based on the simple principle that productivity drives engagement, which in turn drives greater levels of productivity, this process-driven methodology can bring about breakthrough results.

While implementation strategies will vary, here are five of the things we have seen organizations do to achieve greater levels of productivity and engagement:

As with all change initiatives, get acceptance and buy-in from senior leaders. Little will be accomplished without this; the best results are achieved when leaders understand the benefits of engagement and take action.

Create a formalized implementation plan and establish performance measures so that progress can be tracked. Develop realistic, achievable, and measurable goals and objectives.

Work with the leaders so that they can model the right behaviors and cascade the concepts to their reports and throughout the organization. These behaviors include timely performance feedback, effective listening, and empowering people with education and support.

Reward and recognize people so that they feel supported in their efforts.

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Finding the Right Tool for the Job

It’s been said that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Such is not the challenge we face today! Over the past 50 years, a tremendous number of analysis and problem-solving tools have been developed and are available to deploy in the unending quest for better service to customers, producing greater value with less waste. In today’s world, the efficiency and efficacy of continuous improvement depends on selecting the best analysis and problem-solving tool at the right time.

To move to a system of continuous improvement requires that organizations develop the right mindset and use the right language and tools every day, in all their activities. That is a major culture change for most organizations.

But once people know what to work on, the question becomes which tools and methods will help you achieve your goals.

With our vast experience in a variety of industries, cultures and countries, we work with you to identify those methods and teach you to build your skills so that you can apply those methods and tools to future problems and opportunities.